I don't wish to speak ill of the dead, and I’m sure that in real life he was a lovely man who was good to his family and a gracious director who knew the names of everyone on the set and treated them all with respect: but based purely on his films the late Tony Scott seems to have been one of the coldest princes of darkness ever to walk the earth. Sure, it was a gleaming, neon lit, magic hour, shafts-of-sunlight-coming-through-the-venetian-blinds kind of darkness, a rainbow nihilism, but the only good use a Tony Scott film had for heart was as an efficient location to park a bullet or store a knife. Now Quentin Tarantino hardly gushes with compassion or empathy. He is not a man to be cast as a prison guard in your Stanford experiment, and this early script of his is a nasty piece of work that is clumsy and callous at least as often as it is inspired and humorous; but even so, its treatment by Scott feels like a desecration. It is back in cinemas this week as part of the BFI's Love season, a selection celebrating romantic films; you wonder if they actually saw it before they programmed it or were they just going by the title?

Its reappearance takes us back to the early 90s when QT burst into the mainstream with Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, surely the exciting American filmmaker to emerge since Spielberg. Around the time it was still possible for other directors to buy up his early scripts, the ones he was banging out while working in a video store, and make their own films out of them. Both the scripts that got made back then, this and Natural Born Killers*, were reworkings of Badlands. (In NBK that's obvious but here you probably wouldn't make that connection if it wasn't for Hans Zimmer's shameless appropriation of Carl Orff's Musica Poetica from the Badlands soundtrack.) In Malick's 70s classic drama an aimless young man obsessed with being cool like James Dean picks up a girl and goes on a killing spree in which he murders some innocent people. In True Romance, an aimless young man Clarence (Slater) who is obsessed with being cool like Elvis, hooks up with a young girl Alabama (Arquette) and goes off on a spree in which they get lots and lots of innocent (and not so innocent) people killed.

True Romance was the first Tarantino script to be sold and you can tell that it's the work of a man working in video store dreaming of a life of sex and money and Hollywood success. Clarence works in a comic store and is so shy that his boss hires a call girl for him on his birthday. Only she falls in love with him and suddenly our mild mannered clerk is going off to kill her wigger pimp (Oldman), inadvertently seizing a suitcase full of cocaine and driving off to Hollywood to sell it to movie producer, pursued by mafia hitmen. The aspect that really gives it away as being by a man who maybe didn't get out too much is the way that everywhere Clarence goes, people fall over themselves to tell him how cool he is: the movie producer (Saul Rubinek) loves him, the cops (Chris Penn and Tom Sizemore) listening in to on a wire love him and the spirit of Elvis (Kilmer,) pops up to tell him, “I like you Clarence, I always liked you.” This adoration is cool is QT's Achilles heel, it leads him astray.

His original had a more down beat ending and played the usual Tarantino tricks with the time structure. In bringing it to the screen Scott brightened up the ending and put events in chronological order but was otherwise faithful. It's a very canny piece of writing for someone looking to get a foot in the door in Hollywood. It is commercial and packed with showstopping scenes and brief memorable roles. It means that the film could pull in a star studded cast who could get memorable parts that only required maybe a day or two of their time. That's very smart. So you have people like Hopper turn up to play his Dad, Walken has a scene as gangster, Pitt appears as a stoner flatmate and James Gandolfini as a hitman.

They all get to do great work and deliver some peachy perfect dialogue: Hopper and Walken's Sicilian scene; Gandolfini's monologue about how tough it was starting out as a hitman but now he does it just to watch their expressions change. But in Scott's film the best moments are also the worst. Gandolfini is really brilliant in the role, but his great moment is part of an almost unwatchably brutal sequence in which he beats up Alabama in a hotel room. It is a nasty idea to begin with but Scott has him smashing her through the glass of the shower cubicle, (a scene that was edited by the BBFC when the film was released two decades ago) perhaps to echo a similar moment in brother Ridley's Blade Runner. The Walken/ Hopper showdown is still a scene where you perk up in your seat when it starts, but it is spoilt by the Scott's decision to start pipping Delibes Flower Duet onto the soundtrack, the same music he used in The Hunger and his British Airway's advert. (Or was that Ridley?)

It is also spoilt be the inevitability that Hopper will be killed at the end, nobly trying to protect his son. The son who he hadn't seen for three years and turns up out of nowhere to ask for a favour and get him killed because he was so stupid as to leave his driving licence in the hands of a man he had just murdered. At the start of the scene Walken tells him him he's going to kill either way so I guess he had no choice, but frankly I don't think Clarence and Alabama were worth the sacrifice. In Greek mythology, the mortals are playthings of the Gods on Olympus; in True Romance all the great acting Titans are at the mercy of two feckless kids. They are cartoon lovers, self absorbed and unconcerned or oblivious to the pain and suffering they cause: they are not worthy of the amount of ultra violence they generate in this film and I had nothing invested in their happy ending.

Of course, maybe the film and its title are more subtle than I'm giving it credit: maybe it's making the point that ultimately young love is stupid and selfish and gets people killed. Either way, only a misanthrope would consider this a suitable choice for a season of films about Love.

*Supposedly the two films came out of one epic script, The Open Road written with Roger Avary